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What it lacked in technical capability only 5K RAM, column text display , it made up for in attractiveness to home users by including BASIC built-in, Atari compatible controller ports, and color graphics that suited themselves well to video games. Coupled with impressive graphical and sound capabilities that rivaled home video game consoles, consumers fell in love with the C Commodore sold an estimated million units of this popular machine over its lifespan , and vendors released over 10, software applications for the platform.
Today, the Commodore 64 remains an undisputed icon of the early PC era. In , Commodore experimented with packaging its popular Commodore 64 home PC into a portable bundle with an integrated color monitor and disk drive that would hopefully appeal to business users. The result was the SX, which was quite possibly the first portable PC with a color display.
Of course, this achievement came at a cost -- the machine still required a standard AC power outlet to operate no batteries here , and it weighed 23 pounds. Most business users shied away from the heavy machine being merely a portable version of a very consumer machine , and it did not sell as well as Commodore hoped.
The firm discontinued the SX in In its quest to undercut itself and everyone else before fears of a Japanese takeover of the American PC market, Commodore released several low-cost home computers in The first was the Commodore 16 , an intended replacement for the VIC which was nonetheless completely incompatible with every Commodore machine before it including mostly different peripheral ports.
It flopped hard in the US. The C was essentially three machines in one, and it sold fairly well despite launching at the end of the 8-bit home computer era. In mid, Commodore launched a new platform that would carry the company throughout its remaining decade in business: The Amiga stood out initially for its impressive graphics and sound capabilities -- which came courtesy of custom chips exclusive to the machine -- and for its mouse-driven multitasking graphical operating system.
The Amiga platform faced stiff competition from Atari, Apple, and IBM, but it eventually gained a foothold in the TV production world where it proved capable at generating on-screen graphics and video effects.
It was successful enough to transition Commodore away from its 8-bit products and into the s, where the firm ultimately caved under pressure from omnipresent and ever-more-capable IBM PC compatible machines. Benj Edwards.
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View As: One Page Slides. Commodore's first in-house personal computer, the PET Personal Electronic Transactor , included a built-in cassette tape drive for data storage, a small monochrome monitor, and an awkward chiclet keyboard baked into a heavy, all-in-one metal case. Despite its eccentricities, it found early success in American schools.
Commodore followed up this model with many compatible successors in similar cases throughout the late s and early s. Steven Stengel, Kit Spencer. What it lacked in technical capability only 5K RAM, column text display , it made up for in attractiveness to home users by including BASIC built-in, Atari compatible controller ports, and color graphics that suited themselves well to video games.
Coupled with impressive graphical and sound capabilities that rivaled home video game consoles, consumers fell in love with the C Commodore sold an estimated million units of this popular machine over its lifespan , and vendors released over 10, software applications for the platform. Today, the Commodore 64 remains an undisputed icon of the early PC era.
In , Commodore experimented with packaging its popular Commodore 64 home PC into a portable bundle with an integrated color monitor and disk drive that would hopefully appeal to business users. The result was the SX, which was quite possibly the first portable PC with a color display.
Of course, this achievement came at a cost -- the machine still required a standard AC power outlet to operate no batteries here , and it weighed 23 pounds. Most business users shied away from the heavy machine being merely a portable version of a very consumer machine , and it did not sell as well as Commodore hoped. The firm discontinued the SX in In its quest to undercut itself and everyone else before fears of a Japanese takeover of the American PC market, Commodore released several low-cost home computers in The first was the Commodore 16 , an intended replacement for the VIC which was nonetheless completely incompatible with every Commodore machine before it including mostly different peripheral ports.
It flopped hard in the US.
The C was essentially three machines in one, and it sold fairly well despite launching at the end of the 8-bit home computer era. In mid, Commodore launched a new platform that would carry the company throughout its remaining decade in business: The Amiga stood out initially for its impressive graphics and sound capabilities -- which came courtesy of custom chips exclusive to the machine -- and for its mouse-driven multitasking graphical operating system.
The Amiga platform faced stiff competition from Atari, Apple, and IBM, but it eventually gained a foothold in the TV production world where it proved capable at generating on-screen graphics and video effects. It was successful enough to transition Commodore away from its 8-bit products and into the s, where the firm ultimately caved under pressure from omnipresent and ever-more-capable IBM PC compatible machines.